Wrack

Also, the latest blog focues on texture sets and level design. I think you guys will find it interesting! (NOTE: This'll probably be the last one I post here on a regular basis. Subscribe if you want to keep up with these!)

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re; keeping yourself honest, regarding level length. TEXTURES. Less is more, yes. But minor variations on a theme... ah, now you are talking. Worked for id, worked for mozart as well.

And regarding plot and character development... pains me to say it, as somoeone in whose best interests it is to make game writing suck less but... the best games from my childhood are those in which I, personally, wholly inhabited the character. Putting words into my mouth, as it were, only served to divorce me from the reality in which the game inhabited. All we need to know is what the character did *before* the commencement of the game. Anything else should be the result of player interface.

As for bad guys... uh, well, actions speak louder than words. You can tell the protagonist what a massive dick the enemy is, or you can SHOW THEM. You think your bad guy is an evil fuck? Add in mutilated examples of his craft... the strogg turn humans into machines? Don't tell the player, show examples of marines falling into blenders and being reassembled.

A good writer is, again, less valued than a good director. A good writer is the ideas man, whereas a good director will take those ideas and put them into visuals. And through visuals you can tell a story, without resorting to drawing the player out of the experience by introducing a third person narrative.

Fuck. Morgan. Freeman.

More; why not post these videos here? Why say to me that I won't hear any more about this project unless I subscribe?

Foolishness.

Fuck youtube. Fuck facebook. Fuck anyone who is sucked into this whole "information by one medium" thing that seems be be going around right now... information is information. yes, use facetube and youbook but don't forget that forums like this one are the ones that bred the likes of you. We are marinated in the same sauce; ultimately, your biggest fans and biggest critics come from the same place. Insulting both fans and critics by declaring them obsolete in comparison to facetards is a mistake.

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The whole "The main character is YOU!" thing has been done to death, and I feel like it's time for something different. Besides, I think it's a cheap cop out for writing an actual character. Plus, the interactions between all of the characters are very important in the Wrack universe, so having the main character serve as a tabula rasa wouldn't work very well.

Variation on a theme is something I've been consciously trying to do all along, and in more areas than just textures/visual elements. The first part of a new level typically introduces a new gameplay element where it's kept simple so that you can get a feel for how it works in a sterile environment. Then, it's used in more interesting (and challenging!) ways later on. For instance, E1L4 first shows you conveyor belts behind some glass. Then, you can actually interact with them later on in the level in a fairly safe environment. Finally, on E1L5, those conveyor belts are combined with other elements introduced on that and the previous level, like crushing walls and spike balls. It's a great format and I'll probably do a vlog on sonata format at some point.

Yes, character traits will be shown to the player, rather than told. I'm perfectly aware that the latter would make for bad writing.

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Nevertheless, both are valid ways of "writing" the player character, what it comes down to is what you want to achieve through the game's narrative. Doom wouldn't work with a written player, for example, but Far Cry 3 also wouldn't work without one since the game's narrative theme is a rich, spoiled kid's transformation into a blood hungry madman. Barring any issues in the writing itself, the question that remains is how well the game's mechanics fit into the chosen style of writing. The less pervasive the writing is, the less you have to suspend your disbelief while doing gamey stuff that clashes with what the story is trying to tell you. A problem with story-driven FPS games is that these games are in fact very gamey, compared to RPGs for example where the mechanics can be made to accommodate the writing more...

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Barring any issues in the writing itself, the question that remains is how well the game's mechanics fit into the chosen style of writing. The less pervasive the writing is, the less you have to suspend your disbelief while doing gamey stuff that clashes with what the story is trying to tell you.

Reminds me of this article, which is about having the story dictated by the gameplay rather than the reverse.

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Reminds me of this article, which is about having the story dictated by the gameplay rather than the reverse.

Right. Well, we're not making that type of mistake. Most of the storytelling is done with storyboards between the levels (like in Mega Man X6). Within the maps, there are small cutscenes that typically occur at the very beginning, so there's no action per se that it's cutting away from. There are also a couple that occur before/after boss fights, but they don't interfere with the universe the gameplay has established.

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I'm usually not a huge fan of cutscenes, but storyboard-style is probably the least intrusive way to go. I have seen them done well in Dead Nation and parts of Infamous, for instance. They're nice because they don't infringe on gameplay (Half-Life 2 is guilty of weaving its narrative with gameplay, which is one of the reasons it's so painful to replay) and they're easily skippable if you don't want to watch them for whatever reason.

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Right. Well, we're not making that type of mistake. Most of the storytelling is done with storyboards between the levels (like in Mega Man X6). Within the maps, there are small cutscenes that typically occur at the very beginning, so there's no action per se that it's cutting away from. There are also a couple that occur before/after boss fights, but they don't interfere with the universe the gameplay has established.

That's not what the article/speech was about though. The point was that what the gameplay tells of the world should be in cohesion with what the story also tells, regardless of the storytelling methods being used. As an exaggerated example, if the game tells a story of a pacifist thief who makes living by robbing people of their riches, the gameplay should not involve you going on a murderous rampage. Whether the story is told via cutscenes or comics or whatever is irrelevant to this particular argument (although we can probably all agree that the less the storytelling takes you away from the action in an action game, the better :) ).

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If Final Fantasy 7 had tried to explain its mechanics, not only would it have avoided this
basic inconsistency, it could have been a groundbreaking piece of speculative fiction
with a setting completely unique in the games of its time.

It did - your characters never actually die in battle, the same as in any other Final Fantasy game. (Got bored halfway through the article, and this really changes nothing about what I did read, but it jumped out at me. Terrible example.)

I'd say the biggest offenders in story - gameplay disconnect are the newer GTA games. I'd rather these games went back to having a silent protagonist than having your characters cutscene actions and personality be completely different than how you play them. GTA's protagonist needs to be an uncaring cold-blooded murderer or the story just doesn't fit the game at all. The "nice guy, corrupt world" thing they have going recently really doesn't fit.

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Since you brought up X6 Carn, I hope you don't make the same mistake Capcom did (more so in X5) and make us read walls of text we don't care about. The storyboards in those games were incredibly lame at conveying the story compared to the...three? anime scenes in X4. Less is more in some cases.

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You're certainly not forced to read anything. The escape key skips right over both the storyboards and cutscenes. Working on these levels and playtesting them constantly, I'd certainly be incredibly annoyed if that weren't the case. It's not just for my and other mappers' sake, though - you shouldn't be forced to read something you don't want to. I can't imagine not being able to skip them being a good thing for replay value, either.

Also, the X6 storyboards, while they had great art... just sucked. So boring. I'm sure part of it is just them doing a poor job on the translation. They didn't even bother to have english voices. X4 was certainly much better, and I'd love to do something like that, but we don't have the budget for it. Doing these X6-style storyboards is already pushing it.

BTW (Dragonsbrethren), I forgot to mention that the game you mentioned earlier about really wanting to see on Steam, Shantae, is one of the very few games I've voted for and would love to see on Steam. I haven't played it, but it certainly looks like a great, fun game and if it's affiliated with Capcom in any way (seems like they published the first one), then all the better! It's the kind of game I'd love to throw my support behind, but as I said in one of the previous vlogs, it'd be stupid for me to do so.

Jodwin: I explained my point poorly, but I was trying to say that Wrack's gameplay and story are cohesive. Guess you'll just have to take my word for it.

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Yeah, I figured you'd be nice enough to let the scenes be skipped, but I meant more that I don't want to have to skip your scenes - I want to enjoy them! That's something Capcom really failed at in the X series after X4 (X8 was good from what I remember, though, and I never played the RPG), and I actually blame trying to tell better stories as being the reason. I suspect that, even in the original Japanese, the writing isn't good enough to justify the amount of text on the screen. The writing wasn't really any better in previous games, but it was brief and to the point (and having text boxes that could fit more than two lines at ta time certainly helped, talk about regressions).

So yeah, in short, having good writing and keeping it brief are vital to enjoying this kind of story sequence. (I'm not even sure where I'm going with this, but hey.)

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Yeah, I'm trying to make them interesting. I'm putting a lot of effort into giving the characters diverse, interesting personalities and to make each scene have meaning and most importantly, be pretty damn entertaining. Even if I catastrophically fail on that front, there should still be some pretty damn nice artwork backing it all up.

I've been tweaking (and even totally revamping) scenes when necessary, and so far people seem to be enjoying them quite a bit - even without the art being complete. Bobby also knows some voice actors, so we're looking to have voice overs as well. When it's all done, it should be great. It'll add another dimension to the game, help differentiate it from other FPS's, and it should be something more casual players will enjoy a lot.

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in an honest unbiased opinion even if i work for carn, i wasn't really into Carn's story when i read it on paper at first, the elements it had sounded all too generic to me, and i was like, dude it doesnt need this.. Personaly im more of a person that likes to fill in the story himself in a way that the first unreal did, or doom, just being a nobody trying to escape.

Then some months later when the character biographys where written and the dialogs started to enter the game i was suprised by how it unfolded. And im not just saying this to promote Wrack, In fact im not always happy with certain design choises or directions carn takes, we differ a lot when it comes to Taste.

But to get back on the story, The "generic" elements are still there but it is brought upon such a way that it is quite unique, the characters all have their own tone in dialogue and personality wich start to grow on you once you get further in the game,

Its even so that if their names and portraits arent visible im already able to figure out wich line belongs to whom,

The game is also full of silly humour but never so much that it breaks the games flow or get in the way of the story, it felt much like how they did it in the pokemon Gameboy games, the games are presented light hearted and humorous but also serve the player with darker mature elements.

For example in the pokemon games there was a town where in some pokemons got missing and it turned out that team rocket stole those pokemons to only cut of their tales to sell them,
This is a mature subject and you could feel sorry for the pokemons in the story, but the game itself wasnt dead serious, but it could make you care for the story and feel emphaty with the characters.

I think Wrack does this fairly well and im eager to see what carn has in store for the future of the game, because as it stands now it has quite some ways to evaluate.

Im currently working on certain story elements too in my art, the current levels are facilities of a company called Ostern Technologies
wich is now visible and hinted to the player. In our next release players now can experience the reasons why they are in the place the levels take place.

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I just did a video blog on a topic that I think you guys will find interesting - the Principles of Design, which are a set of guidelines and ideas to help create captivating visuals. I've harped about this in the past, and it's a subject I enjoy quite a bit. Hell, learning about it all in college made it (almost) worth it.

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See, this is why I was hesitant to post these every week, or post anything with any sort of frequency: It's very difficult to keep people collectively interested for a long period of time. There's just too much competition for people's attention these days.

See you guys when we're ready to ramp things up again and get this thing greenlit.

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it might have been worth touching on colour design as well, something that seldom gets touched by members of the doom community because (a) everyone sucks too much to make their own textures and (b) poor colour choice is actually inherently forced upon doom mappers due to the limited doom palette.

a couple of schools of thinking on this one - the graphic designer in me says use three colours, no more, no less, to achieve striking, unified level design. Quake would be a good example of this sort of thinking. It also makes adding Focal Points easier (glowing red eyes to denote enemies that need shot, spurts of red blood to make things seem visceral, red crosses on medipaks... if you see red in quake, then you know it is important).

jaws, the movie, is another good example of this sort of thinking where all the props were carefully chosen to subliminally install a sense of dread in the viewer. the colour yellow in jaws only appears then the shark is hanging about (alex kitner's raft, the barrels quint uses to drag the shark to the surface). this theme, whilst subtle and unlikely to be noticed by the casual movie viewer, is repeated often enough for some primitive monkey part of our brain to associate yellow with danger.

note that the life jackets in jaws are not, as common sense might dictate, yellow; it would have utterly ruined the movie to have the main leads swimming off into the horizon whilst wearing the shark's signature colour, a subliminal suggestion that the shark was still out there, waiting beneath the water to eat our heroes and denying audience catharsis.

there is also the danger of making your level design static. Yes, human beings like symmetry, but we also appreciate movement and minor variations within. the bare bones of a level benefit from a level of symmetry, but making it an identical mirror image just makes things artificial. Consider a human face, the first thing human beings study as babies (thus patterning us to find symmetry reassuring and pleasing); yes, faces are mostly symmetrical, but it is with the flaws in that symmetry that we learn to identify individual faces (you have a mole on the nth quadrant of your cheekbone and a scar to your temple, your name is alex, you have a raging squint in your left eye and a birthmark in the shape of a burst tampon on your neck, your name is sophie). Again, you can condition a player to look for repeated symmetry in your levels and reward / punish them for it.

Consider a series of four square rooms, spread out of the course of a few levels; each time so far upon finding a square room imps have teleported in. You are, therefore, put on guard whenever you see a square room because you are expecting imps. So, by deliberately fucking with the player in square room #5 and blasting him with barons of hell, you are messing with the player's sense of symmetry, will put him on edge and throw out any previously ingrained notions he / she may of had.

expect the unexpected etc.

on that note, if you are struggling to maintain people's attention with your update videos why not get one of your minions to narrate a video for you on the subject they are currently concerned with? if people are bored with carnevil blathering then shove your texture artist out there and get him to mix things up a little.

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on that note, if you are struggling to maintain people's attention with your update videos why not get one of your minions to narrate a video for you on the subject they are currently concerned with? if people are bored with carnevil blathering then shove your texture artist out there and get him to mix things up a little.

I think he did a nice job with it, too! He talks about the (obviously awesome) art style and why we have that style, and some of the improvements we've been making to the visuals in general. As you can see from the video... there are plenty! It's all coming together beautifully.

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While the art style is very clean and; the textures are quite nice, I don't really dig it. I think it's because the levels don't really have a sense of place and seem sameish. I would rather like levels to be a bit more unique and a tad more realistic as in "this room is clearly this or that". A good example of what I'm talking about is The Refinery by Tormentor667, very modern but very fitting at the same time.

In The Refinery, you can see a very fitting blend of Doom 3 and old school, which what I'd like to see. Not only that but the map actually feels like a real place (in Doom terms). To sum it up, the environments just doesn't feel as serious as Doom which is weird since it is a lot more detailed than Doom. Maybe this amount of detail works in Doom because it's low res?

Another thing is that the enemies don't really feel unique. They feel too random. Metal spiders, humanoid soldiers, robots and drones aren't really interesting. Compared to the demons of hell from Doom, which have a lot of personality.

One more thing. Old school shooters are very popular at the moment and a lot of people would like to make more shooters like Doom, what do you think about licensing the engine to indie devs?

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Thank you for your feedback DooM_RO i appreciate it. Ive taken a look at refinery and played trough it. I see what you are trying to say. while it looks good it is just the thing that we want to avoid.

As ive stated in my video. A realistic style would not support the direction we gave the game. Not only was the map realistic but it was also very dark and monotone in color usage. Altough i liked the architecture a lot. And i understand what you where trying to say about the sections. also other levels from Tormentor like Sapphire have great use in color as well.

A common misconception about wrack is that it is seen as a 100% Doom tribute and nothing else. While the shooting mechanics and some other design choises are ofcourse in the vein of doom, at first sight it might look like wrack is a doom clone.

That has been the reason why we have put the emphasis more on the other half of the game. when you take a look at the game when we where called strike / vega people thought it was quake 2. cube 2. or something like that. so if we kept to that it would confuse people even more. and the "unrealism" of the level design would look totally silly.

So why are the levels unrealistic you would ask me. well, As wrack is partially based on old arcade games we want to emulate that feeling in the mix with first person shooter. If you take a look at some of the snes games i mentioned at youtube. You would see that almost all of the level designs do not make sense in terms of realism. its all in favour of the gameplay, and more of a obstacle course approach.

And i think so far we did reach pretty well with our game.
On the enemy part, when i joined the wrack team i thought the same as what you describe, but now that Carn has put the story in and the description of all monsters, it becomes clear that evry monster or robot has its reason why its looking and behaving like they do.

For example, a lot of people question us. "Where does the sword come from, i dont get it.." All those kind of things are getting answered in the story and dialog. The sword was a present from Kains friend, Fabian wich also plays a keyrole in the episodes.he has made the sword in the Hyperion generator, Altough weapons are not allowed to be made with it, they where impressed by its design and it was clearly made for its looks. so as an exception kain could have it as a decorative souvenir, and thats just right before the invasion starts as seen in the cutscenes. so kain ends up with that sword in his hands when the game begins

Also i can tell you that im a big fan of oldschool shooters like unreal 1, quake 2, or even sin. wich are more close to what you describe, and i would sure love to do something like that in the future so i understand what you are missing in Wrack. But then again. Wrack is not aimed at that target audience specificly, But it might appeal to a lot of people with that background, but youre never going to make evryone happy.

I hope i clearified some things up for you
and ofcourse still hoping you would like the game.
Im also heading for quakecon this year. so might see you there.

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Well, The Refinery isn't exactly realistic it's...Doom realistic, meaning that compared to modern games, it's not realistic at all but for Doom standards it is. In the end it's not the realism that makes it good (or any other "good-looking" Doom map), it's the atmosphere, a CRITICAL component of Doom which is often overlooked by a lot of casual FPS players which leads them to comparing Doom with Serious Sam or Painkiller and that's just completely wrong. I haven't played your game yet but I've watched a lot of videos and again, it looks good from a technical standpoint but it lacks atmosphere. I'm not saying you should copy the Doom 3/ The Refinery style, I'm merely asking you to look at what these examples do from an atmosphere POV. Atmosphere is the reason why I like Doom 3 more than some people here (even though it has its problems as well)

Regarding the monsters...I just don't agree at all. First-Person Shooters are primarily VISUAL, people don't really care about the story justifications of the monsters' appearance. This is especially true to games like these. Therefore, the personality of the levels and monsters should come from the way they LOOK and ACT combined with interesting gameplay.

To make an analogy, imagine if Mortal Kombat were focused 75% on story and 25% on visuals. The reason why MK was so successful is not only because of blood but because of how iconic the characters looked, the visual effect of their moves (equivalent to the animations of the guns) and how these moves influenced other characters (just ask yourself why shooting a pinky or an imp with an SSG is so satisfying). I like to call this action and re-action. The things you SEE, you DO and the monsters do to you is what should give a game like this personality. The story of the game merely COMPLEMENTS the characters.The story alone can't make them interesting. This is why Midway/NetherRealm characters are able to get away with paper-thin personalities. While the rivalry of Sub-Zero and Scorpion is iconic, it's nothing special but it still makes BOTH characters more likeable. However, without their uniqueness mentioned before, the story part would have fallen flat.

The way I see it, you have a long way to go before you make a game the calibre of Doom, it has so many little things that are so neatly stitched together that people don't see them anymore.

The Doom community has so many extremely talented mappers who can balance gameplay and visuals/atmosphere. Why not hire a few? The first that come to mind are Esselfortium (my all-time favorite) and Kristus. Since making maps for these kind of games is not really that hard, it doesn't even need to be a full-time job.

I also hope you will take the engine licensing in consideration, it could be incredibly beneficial to you and the retro gaming community.

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Your criticism is fine, you have all the right to express it. Actually eisselfortum has been on the team in the early days. I dont know for what reason he stopped working on the game. he has given me tips on texturing back then.
we have tryed to take on a few more people from dw. but people just vanished after a week or 2 or had other things going on or they did not abide with deadlines and such,even toh it was a payed position. i rather did not get involved with these things back in the day. I just wanted to stay in the background and be neutral. because some people seem to have a history here.

We have been stuck for a year or so trying to find people to do it but we could either cancel the game or go further with what we had.

I cant argue about level design because im not a mapper. and i do not have enough knowledge about it. i create all the texturesets and monster textures particles etc according to what i read about it int he design document. so basicly anything 2d.

but once again we are not trying to copy doom or its atmosphere. its something different. also the levels from back in november do not represent the game anymore. if you scroll a few pages back you can see some screens from the new level layouts. wich where recieved pretty positive here. Also if an experienced mapper would apply to work for Wrack i would immediatly say yes to that. unfortunateley the budget is running thin. and i think it is a bit too late. maybe with episode 2.

as for the monsters. they are not just randomly made or plopped into The game. Look at the monsters for megaman for example. we want to be closer to that then to doom. A combination of drones, robots, and humanoids in suits. and big boss guys.

you say that the demons of doom have personality and our robots and drones don't. This is an opinion or matter of taste. There is no basic ruleset for how enemeis should look in this type of shooters. there is nothing i can do to chance that. but you have the right to not like it.

As i stated before it is hard to please evryone. And luckily the majority seems to think otherwise. Heck some people even asked for Geizer plushies already. ( a monster from the game) i think that wouldnt have happened if it had no personality.

I cant decide what happens with licensing the engine because Brad is the project lead and all decisions are made by him im just a freelancer / employee. He will look into this further

You should meet him at Quakecon im sure he is open for discussion. it also would be cool if you could give the game a go there. Maybe your vision about it can alter a bit when you have played it. who knows!

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So, I've noticed a lot of comments along the lines of "It's just cel-shaded Doom, right? What's so special about this?" (and by the way, after all the level revamping, I no longer think that argument has legs), so I've made a vlog that addresses that. Bring on the gratuitous complaining and nitpicking! *sigh*

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Can't watch right now so won't comment on the vlog...but how is that a bad thing? Doom is a great game, and making a modern version of it wouldn't be bad either.

I touch on that in the video, but it pretty much boils down to how much emphasis players of these sorts of games place on innovation. If there's a perception that Wrack isn't some ground-breaking thing, they're not interested. If Wrack is then reduced to "It's Doom/Borderlands", that glosses over the innovation it actually does bring to the table.

It's an unfortunate attitude since it seems to favor novelty over good design. Recently I've been having a total blast playing Dust: An Elysium Tail (so much so that it's interfered with my ability to get things done!). It's an absolutely goregous, fun, and overall fantastic game. It's very similar in a lot of ways to Symphony of the Night (I guess it'd be what, a metroidvania-type game?). Is it particularly ground-breaking? Is it innovative? I don't know. Maybe. It's not really important to me. What is important is that it's a game with great design, great music with an engaging story and characters. If I got hung up on "Where's the innovation?!", I'd be missing out on a fantastic game.

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I touch on that in the video, but it pretty much boils down to how much emphasis players of these sorts of games place on innovation. If there's a perception that Wrack isn't some ground-breaking thing, they're not interested. If Wrack is then reduced to "It's Doom/Borderlands", that glosses over the innovation it actually does bring to the table.

It's an unfortunate attitude since it seems to favor novelty over good design. Recently I've been having a total blast playing Dust: An Elysium Tail (so much so that it's interfered with my ability to get things done!). It's an absolutely goregous, fun, and overall fantastic game. It's very similar in a lot of ways to Symphony of the Night (I guess it'd be what, a metroidvania-type game?). Is it particularly ground-breaking? Is it innovative? I don't know. Maybe. It's not really important to me. What is important is that it's a game with great design, great music with an engaging story and characters. If I got hung up on "Where's the innovation?!", I'd be missing out on a fantastic game.

Hmm, I see! Things are a lot more clearer now.

Have you given more thought about what I told you about engine licensing? I would LOVE a spiritual successor to Doom made by the very best people from Doomworld.